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“Since the values of the market were the highest criteria, persons also became valued as commodities which could be bought and sold. A person's worth is then his salable market value, whether it is skill or 'personality' that is up for sale. [...]
The market value, then, becomes the individual's valuation of himself, so that self-confidence and 'self-feeling' (ones experience of identity with one's self) are largely reflections of what others think of one, in this case the 'others' being those who represent the market. Thus contemporary economic processes have contributed not only to an alienation of man from man, but likewise to 'self-alienation' - an alienation of the individual from himself. As Fromm very well summarizes the point:

Since modern man experiences himself both as the seller and as the commodity to be sold on the market, his self-esteem depends on conditions beyond his control. If he is 'successful,' he is valuable; if he is not, he is worthless. The degree of insecurity which results from this orientation can hardly be overestimated. If one feels that one's own value is not constituted primarily by the human qualities one possesses, but by one's succes on a competitive market with ever-changing conditions, one's self-esteem is bound to be shaky and in constant need of confirmation by others. [Erich Fromm, Man for himself]

In such a situation one is driven to strive relentlessly for 'succes'; this is the chief way to validate ones self and to allay anxiety. And any failure in the competitive struggle is a threat to the quasi-esteem for one's self - which, quasi though it be, is all one has in such a situation. This obviously leads to powerful feelings of helplessness and inferiority.
[p.169f]”
― Rollo May, The Meaning of Anxiety

“To make them forget how bad human beings are, they were taught too insistently that bears are good. Instead of being told honestly what humans are and what bears are.”
― Umberto Eco, How to Travel With a Salmon & Other Essays

“Most of my important lessons about life have come from recognizing how others from a different culture view things.”
― Edgar H. Schein, Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling

“It will no doubt be agreed that there are multitudes of these defiant, aggressive types in our culture. But they do not frequent psychoanalysts' offices because our competitive culture (in which, to a considerable extent, the individual who can aggressively exploit others without conscious guilt feeling is 'succesful') supports and 'cushions' them to a greater extent than the opposite types. It is generally the culturally 'weak' individuals who get to the psychoanalyst; for in cultural terms they have the 'neurosis' and the succesfully agressive person does not.”
― Rollo May

“The fact is, man has never stayed by a single ideal. The mass enthusiasm when you were young gave way to cool, rationalistic classicism. Today that’s being drowned in turn by a kind of neoromanticism. God knows where that will lead. I probably won’t approve. Regardless, new generations grow up. We’ve no right to freeze them into our own mold. The universe is too wide.”
― Poul Anderson, Tau Zero

“Rumi speaks of people who rely upon the written word as sometimes being no more than donkeys laden with books.”
― Idries Shah, Learning How to Learn: Psychology and Spirituality in the Sufi Way

“We -- the industrialized, technologized world -- have never been richer. And yet to an extraordinary extent we in the West continue to inhabit a moral and cultural universe shaped by the hedonistic imperatives and radical ideals of the Sixties. Culturally, morally the world we inhabit is increasingly a trash world: addicted to sensation, besieged everywhere by the cacophonous, mind-numbing din of rock music, saturated with pornography, in thrall to the lowest common denominator wherever questions of taste, manners or intellectual delicacy are concerned. Marwick was right: 'The cultural revolution, in short, had continuous, uninterrupted, and lasting consequences'.”
― Roger Kimball, The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America

“من المحزن أن نقتل الغابات لننتج الثقافة”
― خوسيه ساراماغو

“JB's friends were poets and performance artists and academics and modern dancers and philosophers -- he had, Malcolm once observed, befriended everyone at their college who was least likely to make money -- and their lives were grants and residencies and fellowships and awards. Success, among JB's Hood Hall assortment, wasn't defined by your box-office numbers (as it was for his agent and manager) or your costars or your reviews (as it was by his grad-school classmates): it was defined simply and only by how good your work was, and whether you were proud of it.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“Death would be an extremely bad thing like most of us paint it, if being dead were painful.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“American culture, perhaps more than any other, prizes individualism. Our narratives of art, politics, and business idolize the person who triumphs against the odds, with only himself or herself to answer to. The lone wolf. The stranger in town. The maverick. The plucky kid. The Final Girl. You've only got yourself, in the end. It's all up to you.”
― Andi Zeisler, We Were Feminists Once: From Riot Grrrl to CoverGirl, the Buying and Selling of a Political Movement

“Deep down, people who deliberately distribute other people’s music and stuff feel contempt for professionals. And it’s not just culture �� these days lots of people are contemptuous of everything. Without realizing it, they’re searching for things to despise.”
― Fuminori Nakamura, Evil and the Mask

“Death is number one on the list of things that we wish were possible to leave behind when we escaped barbarism.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“therein lies the power of culture: it redeems horror by transforming it into existential wisdom. If the spirit of the trial succeeds in annihilating this century's culture, nothing will remain of us but a memory of its atrocities sung by a chorus of children.”
― Milan Kundera, Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts

“Success, Bill Gates said, is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can't lose.
Same goes for good looking people. Beauty reduces the consciousness that it takes more to catch the heart of the right partner.
We often think being good at one thing is all we need to succeed, but hey, success is less of what you are good at, but more of what you are good for.
Of what use is beauty with no brains, culture without character, knowledge that does not impact, or skill that does not add value?
For any seemingly "good" thing to last, great attention we must pay to the unseen intrinsic component that sustains it.”
― Olaotan Fawehinmi, The Soldier Within

“Not being interested in other cultures is the normal state of mankind.”
― Bernard Lewis (Author), The Muslim Discovery of Europe

“The weight placed upon the value of competitive succes is so great in our culture and the anxiety occasioned by the possibility of failure to achieve this goal is so prevalent that there is reason for assuming that individual competitive succes is both the dominant goal in our culture and the most pervasive ocassion for anxiety. ”
― Rollo May, The Meaning of Anxiety

“The cultural past is rigidly deterministic to the extent that the individual is unaware of it. An analogy, of course, is found in any psychoanalytic treatment: the patient is rigidly determined by past experiences and previously developed patterns to the extent that he is unaware of these experiences and patterns.”
― Rollo May, The Meaning of Anxiety

“It is important to note that the acquisition of wealth, as the accepted standard of succes, does not refer to increasing material goods for sustenance purposes, or even for the purpose of increasing enjoyment. It refers rather to wealth as a sign of individual power, a proof of achievement and self-worth.
Modern economic individualism, though based on belief in the free individual, has resulted in the phenomenon that increasingly large numbers of people have to work on the property (capital) of a few powerful owners. It is not surprising that such a situation should lead to widespread insecurity, for not only is the individual faced with a criterion of succes over which he has only partial control but also his opportunities for a job are in considerable measure out of his control.”
― Rollo May, The Meaning of Anxiety

“The Beats inaugurated the long march through the moral territory of American culture. Who knows how many lives were blighted along the way as a result of their proselytizing on behalf of drugs and promiscuous sex?”
― Roger Kimball, The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America

“The task is to become church for them, among them and with them, and under Spirit of God to lead them to become church in their own culture.”
― Tim Chester, Everyday Church: Gospel Communities on Mission

“You cannot step a foot into the literature about the 1960s without being told how 'creative', 'idealistic', and 'loving' it was, especially in comparison to the 1950s. I fact, the counterculture of the Sixties represented the triumph of what the art critic Harold Rosenberg famously called the 'herd of the independent minds'. Its so-called creativity consisted in continually recirculating a small number of radical cliches; its idealism was little more than irresponsible utopianism; and its crusading for 'love' was largely a blind for hedonistic self-indulgence.”
― Roger Kimball, The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America

“Building a prayer culture takes time. . . and relentless pressure over time. I often say that it is much more a crock pot than a microwave.”
― Daniel Henderson, Old Paths, New Power: Awakening Your Church through Prayer and the Ministry of the Word

“The fact of English supremacy is something most native speakers of English unknowingly suppress, all the while enjoying the privileges that come with it. Many non-English-speaking populations, however, cannot afford to suppress that fact but are forced to face it in one way or another, though their writers generally turn their backs on the linguistic asymmetry lest they end up too discouraged to write, overwhelmed by the unfairness of it all.”
― Juliet Winters Carpenter, The Fall of Language in the Age of English

“Contrary to popular belief, some animals would not have each chosen to be a human being, if they were given the choice between being what they are and being human.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Holiness is as much about what you do on a Monday morning on the factory floor as it is about what you do on a Sunday morning in a church gathering. Holiness is as much about the kind of neighbour you are as it is about the kind of church member you are. It is as much about who you are when you are holding a steering wheel as who you are when you are holding a Bible.”
― Tim Chester, Everyday Church: Gospel Communities on Mission

“Danes express their strongest feelings in conjunction with food. That became clear to me the first time I was out visiting friends with Moritz. When I took a third helping of cookies, he looked straight at me.
"Keep on taking until you're ashamed of yourself," he said.
I wasn't confident about my Danish, but I understood what he meant. I helped myself three more times. Without taking my eyes off him. The room disappeared, the people we were visiting disappeared, I didn't taste the cookies. Only Moritz existed.
"I'm still not ashamed," I said.
I helped myself three more times. Then he grabbed the platter and put it out of my reach. I had won. The first of a long series of small, important victories over him and Danish manners.”
― Peter Høeg, Smilla's Sense of Snow

“When our environment changes we change, and this combination of transformative deeds create a synergistic effect. Seemingly, insignificant and imperceptible quantitative changes can eventfully lead to fundamental qualitative changes in the way a group of people function as a society.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“In fact, even Tillich's socialism was accommodationist because it continued the Constantinian strategy: The way to make the church radical is by identifying the church with secular "radicals", that is, socialists.”
― Stanley Hauerwas, Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony

“The way people want to get respect for their culture and language, it is critical to reciprocate the same to other else you don't have any right to condemn others”
― Pankaj Gupta